— Published on May 01, 2026 11:12 AM
All four teams at the Free Software Foundation (FSF) have been working tirelessly the past four months, and we have a lot to show for it!
We looked up from our work for freedom, and realized that it's May! So, we wanted to share with you how the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been advocating for computer user freedom so far this year.
We also want to take this moment to thank those who contribute to our work in the form of donations or an associate membership, or who volunteer their valuable time. They make our work possible. Please consider strengthening our mission to build a freer world by joining them today.
Through our licensing work, we promote understanding of the GNU GPL, protect the FSF's licenses, and help others use them. That includes correcting public statements and commenting on current events. A recent example of one of these public statements was our comment on the Bartz v. Anthropic case, where our position was simple: we demanded freedom:
"Obviously, the right thing to do is protect computing freedom: share complete training inputs with every user of the LLM, together with the complete model, training configuration settings, and the accompanying software source code. Therefore, we urge Anthropic and other LLM developers that train models using huge datasets downloaded from the Internet to provide these LLMs to their users in freedom. We are a small organization with limited resources and we have to pick our battles, but if the FSF were to participate in a lawsuit such as Bartz v. Anthropic and find our copyright and license violated, we would certainly request user freedom as compensation."
Similarly, our executive director Zoë Kooyman avowed the primacy of preserving user freedom when asked recently by The Register to comment on the implications of machine learning for copyleft licenses like the GPL. She stated:
"Now more than ever, with people exploring new ways of circumventing copyright through machine learning, we need to protect the code that preserves user freedom. Free software relies on user and development communities who strongly support copyleft. Experience has shown that it's our strongest defense against similar efforts to undermine user freedom."
The Licensing & Compliance Lab has also continued to provide the free software community with valuable licensing guidance. Most recently, the team has published articles on relicensing and license compatibility, defending user freedom by protecting the integrity of the GNU (A)GPL, and why "Responsible AI" Licenses (RAIL) are neither free nor ethical.
Our tech team has continued to provide the organization with its technical backbone, protecting and maintaining the infrastructure for the GNU project and other free software projects. They work to maintain the current standard of software freedom, tirelessly ensuring our software remains free. Want to use or help maintain confirmed free (as in freedom) software? Use one of the thousands of free software packages in the Licensing & Compliance Lab managed Free Software Directory.
Meanwhile, the operations team has also kept the FSF humming along, supporting our organization in the myriad quiet and profound ways we need to in order to move our mission forward. We have also been actively recruiting for our new Engineering and Certification Manager position.
Looking ahead this May, we are so excited to report that the response to our LibreLocal 2026 meetups global call has been amazing! Our LibreLocal initiative invites free software supporters like you to organize in-person (or virtual) community meetups with our help in your area in May, 2026. We provided financial support to almost all the organizers that applied. We want to bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software, and free software supporters like you have really shown up. There are LibreLocal meetups being held across six different continents, with thirty-nine confirmed meetups organized so far! We are waiting on a few of those meetups to be posted on the LibreLocal page, so please check back soon to see if there is one near you, or organize your own! Simply post your event on the wiki so everyone can see your meetup plans. We will help get the word out to other free software supporters near you through our numerous communications channels.
A big thanks to the organizers of the LibreLocal meetups that have already been held: Narcisse Mbunzama and the Free Software DRC & Digital Security Group (Kinshasa); the LibreTech Collective (Atlanta, GA); the OSS Cameroon community Douala; William Goodspeed (Beijing); the Jordan Open Source Foundation (JOSA) and RISC-V Jordan Community (Amman); and the Nairobi GNU/Linux Users Group (Nairobi).
In February, the campaigns team celebrated I Love Free Software Day (#ILoveFS), a holiday created by Free Software Foundation Europe. Our love went out to the many, many people who maintain and improve free software. Maintainers play a huge role in free software, from writing the initial versions of a project to updating and improving functioning, stability, and alignment with the evolving needs of users. Without the often difficult, sometimes thankless, work of maintainers, much of the free software we use regularly would be significantly less useful, let alone work at all.
We also wrote to you about Google's attempts to place restrictions on Android developers and how they may impact the publishing of free software on ethical and freedom-respecting repositories. We are happy to report Google walked back some of their restrictions because of the resulting widespread push-back to their plans from the community, but the fight is far from over.
Discord also drew our ire in the first quarter of 2026. Under the guise of protecting children, Discord announced the introduction of an age verification system. This new required process would force users to trust Discord and its vendors with personal details to continue to using the nonfree instant messaging and voice/video call platform. Discord's track record of keeping your data secure is hardly encouraging. This dubious track record indicates that rather than protect children as this move purports to, it may very well put all of our data in jeopardy, including the identities of the very children Discord says it wants to protect. Fundamentally, placing our trust in Discord cannot happen so long as Discord locks up its code and fails to respect users who don't want to submit to their invasive age verification process. We challenge Discord to respect user freedom. Until then, we believe that Discord doesn't deserve your unquestioning trust. In addition to the privacy issue, we are looking into how age verification affects user freedom as well as the many age verification laws proposed worldwide.
We demanded Ring respect freedom and people's right to privacy. Amazon's Ring attempted to convince us that it is a lost dog's best friend. Its "search party" feature was rightly mocked widely and considered "creepy" as soon as Ring's glitzy Super Bowl ad pushing the feature aired. Audiences far and wide recognized what Ring is trying to do: deploy a mass surveillance tool with a myriad of civil liberty concerns. The spirited push-back that Ring received underlines the need for user freedom. Amazon's Ring, like Discord, demands our trust without warranting it. This trust can only be established if user freedom is at the heart of software so that everyone is able to exercise their right to privacy and control their own data.
In upcoming campaigns news, mark your calendars for July 17, 2026, International Day Against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), or IDAD. July 17 is the anniversary date in which Amazon removed copies of George Orwell's 1984 off of owners' Kindles without warning or explanation seventeen years ago. IDAD is part of our Defective By Design campaign, a participatory and grassroots campaign working to eliminate DRM because it is a threat to innovation in media, the privacy of readers, and freedom for computer users. More details about this year's IDAD are coming soon.
As we work towards freedom through our licensing, tech, operations, and campaigns teams, we know that all the work that we have accomplished so far this year is because of FSF volunteers, donors, and associate members. You help us take on the predatory proprietary software giants and their government allies, resisting their efforts to track, trap, and take advantage of us.
FSF donors and FSF associate members help us get closer to a free society. We are at a global historical moment that often feels difficult to compare with anything we may have experienced before. But, if we stop to look around, we also see what we as a global community have built together over four decades. We see the rich and profound work we have collaboratively accomplished together. We see the dreams we are collectively bringing forth into reality every day. All of this is exactly what we need to do at this moment in time. Despite the freedom-restrictive world others are trying to force us to accept as inevitable, together we are instead building something far more powerful, affirming, lasting, and free. Out of the debris created by others in this seemingly chaotic and often regressive present, we are methodically, cooperatively, and relentlessly laying the foundations for a more just society.
All of the things that we have so far accomplished this year are because of free software supporters just like you. Please consider donating so we can continue this vital work. Or, for as little as $12 USD a month ($6 USD for students), become part of a huge global community today as an associate member and sustain our mission of promoting freedom over the long term.
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